The city has cleared procedural hurdles for an air quality monitor to be installed at the playground outside the Gilmore School on the city’s south side, and is now awaiting the energy utility National Grid to provide electricity to the site, Mayor Linda Balzotti said Friday.

But plans to start monitoring the city’s air are already months behind.

“The system is ready but it just needs power,” Balzotti said. “(National Grid) knows it’s a priority for us and they’ve been a good partner to us in the past.”

State environmental officials visited Brockton in February and announced plans for a $100,000 “real-time” air quality monitoring station to be placed at Buckley Playground outside the Gilmore School. The station would monitor fine particulate matter on the south side of the city, and help provide air-quality answers in the debate over whether a gas-fired power plant should be built in the area.

Officials said at the time that the station would be completed and tested by late April, with air quality monitoring to begin in May.

Opponents of a proposed gas-fired power plant on Oak Hill Way argue that the air quality in the area is already poor, mostly because of the aging sewer treatment plant that still uses open-air burning of sludge.

Being able to monitor what’s actually in the air would go a long way to determining if the area can support additional emissions without putting residents at risk, power plant opponents said.

Once it’s operational, the monitor will take readings of fine particulate matter in the air, which will be posted to a Department of Environmental Protection website every one to two hours.

Balzotti acknowledged that initial estimates of when the monitor would begin taking readings were optimistic.

“There was a lot of excitement when this was announced,” she said, “but when we looked at what actually needed to happen for the monitor to be installed we realized there were some unanticipated procedural steps we had to go through.”

The mayor, who opposes the power plant, said a timeline would be “tough to predict” but she’s hopeful the air monitor will come online soon.

Opponents of the power plant, including stopthepower.net, had pushed for the air monitoring to begin by summer, when air quality is often at its worst.